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Two Essays on The Count of Monte Cristo

I love The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I have read the unabridged version more than once, and my most recent reread was in 2023. At that time, I wrote a couple of brief essays which I posted on Tumblr, one of which was about a canonically queer character and the other discussed a character who is often left out of the various adaptations. I present for you these essays with expansion and alteration, because I keep returning to them as pieces of writing and because I don't want them to be limited to those original posts. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout, as well as new patrons DivineJasper and Sasha Khan. (Quotes are from Robin Buss’ English translation of Alexandre Dumas’ work.) Link to Audio Version. ----- Canonical Queerness in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas You’d need to change surprisingly little of The Count of Monte Cristo to confirm Eugénie Danglars as a trans man (or a masc-leaning nonbinary person...
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Animorphs Book 17: The Underground by K. A. Applegate

The Underground poses an ethical dilemma related to addiction, and it becomes clear that Cassie's role as the ethical voice is becoming too much. Rachel deals with claustrophobia and Marco laments that none of the great battles involved oatmeal.

Several of the previous books have featured Cassie's role as the voice of morals, reason, and ethics for the Animorphs. In The Underground we start to see that she isn't magically more mature than the rest of them, she's starting to not know what to tell them anymore. They're still kids, probably still in middle school (there hasn't been a direct reference to their level of school in a few books), and nothing is getting easier.

Rachel is the narrator for this one, and this book has a lot of depictions of claustrophobia. I'd have to go back in order to check whether this is a new problem brought on by the events in this book or whether it's been a thread for a while. If it has happened before I think it's been more associated with worrying about not getting out of morph than with being in a small space.

As always, the nightmares are getting worse. Not only are they more frequent, but more of the book is devoted to describing what they are or at least that Rachel is having them.

A girl (Rachel) turns into a bat

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